Commenting behavior

I found one report about the fire on the Sacramento Bee site and looked at their commenting policies, something I want to document as part of the work on SeeSaw.

When you click on “about comments,” you can see that the editors “reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments or ban users who can’t play nice.” That sounds like a lot of work. I will bet SeeSaw can help with that.

The rules they lay out include: “Don’t use profanities, vulgarities or hate speech.” And don’t say anything “in a way you wouldn’t want your own child to hear.” SeeSaw can filter those out. Although I guess on some sites, profanities might be ok, so it should be tunable in that way.

“Don’t use all capital letters. That’s akin to yelling and not appreciated by the audience,” say the Sacramento Bee editors. Yelling is quite emotional, which people often are on subjects. I wonder about prohibiting that. But it is true, all caps text passages are not enticing. But they do express plenty of emotion, which might be legitimate to document.